University Rankings, Diversity, and the New ... - Sense Publishers

ALEX USHER AND JON MEDOW
A GLOBAL SURVEY OF UNIVERSITY RANKINGS
AND LEAGUE TABLES
INTRODUCTION
University rankings or ‘league tables’, a novelty as recently as 15 years ago, are
today a standard feature in most countries with large higher education systems.
They were originally created over 20 years ago by US News and World Report in
order to meet a perceived market need for more transparent, comparative data
about educational institutions. Reviled by critics but popular with parents, copy-cat
ranking systems began popping up all over the world, usually shortly after the
introduction of – or a rapid rise in – tuition fees. Wherever rankings have appeared,
they have been met with a mixture of public enthusiasm and institutional unease.
One of the main causes of institutional unease is the tendency of institutional
ranking schemes to use weighted aggregates of indicators to arrive at a single,
all-encompassing quality ‘score’, which in turn permits institutions to be ranked
against one another. By selecting a particular set of indicators and assigning each a
given weight, the authors of these rankings are imposing a specific definition of
quality on the institutions being ranked. The fact that there may be other legitimate
indicators or combinations of indicators is usually passed over in silence. To the
reader, the author’s judgement is in effect final.
Intriguingly, however, there is little agreement among the authors of these indicators
as to what indicates quality. The world’s main ranking systems bear little if
any relationship to one another, using very different indicators and weightings to
arrive at a measure of quality.
In an earlier paper (Usher and Savino 2006), one of the present authors discussed 17
sets of league tables from around the world. In this chapter, we update the Usher and
Savino results by recording changes in methodology in a few of these rankings, as
well as providing data on nine new systems of rankings. All told, twenty-two of
these are ‘national’ league tables collected from fifteen countries (Australia, Canada,
Chile, China, Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Italy, the Netherlands, Peru, Poland, Spain,
Taiwan, the Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States); while four are
‘international’ or ‘cross-national’ league tables. Specifically, we compare these
league tables in terms of their methods of data collection and their selection and
weighting of indicators. We also look at three other systems (the German CHE
rankings, the SwissUp rankings and the Canadian University Navigator rankings
produced by the Globe and Mail and the Educational Policy Institute 1 ) which do
not conform to the standard league table ‘rules’.
B.M. Kehm and B. Stensaker (eds.), University Rankings, Diversity, and the New Landscape
of Higher Education, 3–18.
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